Maple Leafs players Joffrey Lupul and Dion Phaneuf, along with Phaneuf's wife, actress Elisha Cuthbert, have retained a law firm and are threatening a defamation lawsuit against TSN for accidentally airing a joke tweet claiming Lupul is sleeping with Cuthbert. (Which he totally isn't, lawyers.) They're also threatening the Twitter user, which is kind of a dick move!

"On behalf of our clients Dion Phaneuf, his wife Elisha Cuthbert and Joffrey Lupul, we have sent a letter to TSN demanding that TSN issue a formal apology and pay a significant amount of damages to each of our clients for broadcasting a false and defamatory tweet during their trade deadline show yesterday. We are sending a similar letter to the author of the tweet, Mr. Anthony Adragna.

"It is bad enough that there are people who spend their time using social media to publish such false and malicious stories, but it is made much worse when a reputable media outlet like TSN gives broad circulation and credibility to these false stories by republishing them as TSN did.

"If TSN and Mr. Adragna do not immediately comply with the demands set out in our letters, we have instructions from our clients to immediately commence a lawsuit against them.

"Our clients will not be discussing this matter with the media. Any questions should be directed to the undersigned."

To add an extra layer of weird, TSN is majority owned by Bell Media, which also has a majority stake in the Maple Leafs.

Update: TSN has issued an apology.

Advertisement

Here's our original story on the tweet, which showed up in an automatic scroll during TSN's trade deadline coverage yesterday:

It has been a rough deadline day for TSN. Yesterday, Dustin Penner was pulled from his planned appearance for making some rape jokes on Twitter. Today, the network angered Maple Leafs winger Joffrey Lupul by airing a tweet implying he's sleeping with Elisha Cuthbert, wife of teammate Dion Phaneuf.

The scroll on TSN is clearly automated, pulling tweets with the #tradecentre hashtag and presumably filtering out any profanities. It might've been nice to put some human eyes on the feed, though—they would have caught the one above. (Image by @JE_Iannicello.)

Word filtered back to Lupul, who appears to have misunderstood how the tweet made it to air:

"Earlier today, an inappropriate and disrespectful tweet was erroneously aired. As soon as it was flagged, we immediately removed it. We've reached out to the Toronto Maple Leafs organization and all those impacted to extend our sincerest apologies for our error. It should have never, ever gone to air."

Meanwhile, the best action of the day has come on the Twitter account of the Leafs fan who first set all this shit off:

Advertisement

Advertisement

Anthony's not wrong, there. When we're all waiting on Chris Stewart, it's clearly not a banner deadline day.